We Lived in Castles: A Codex Halloween
by KhamanV
Summary: Loki's investigation of a series of break-ins, fire, and subsequent frightened locals at a closed-down youth reformatory somewhere in the heart of New England becomes a short set of tales within another tale of his own. As he discovers the unlikely squatter in the old facility, he allows the figure to accompany him as he sorts out the boundaries of what actually happened. (Codex 9)
1. This Corrosion

(This story takes place among the ongoing SHIELD Codex stories, but don't require any prior reading. All you need to know is this: What with one thing and another, Loki chooses to work with the agents of SHIELD chasing odd jobs and the occasional unearthly horror. This is a little holiday treat devoted to that. Three days of Halloween.)

We Lived in Castles: A Codex Halloween

 _"History is ultimately an inventory of ghosts." ~ Guillermo Del Toro_

1\. This Corrosion

. . .

Wet leaves still crisp from the autumn cold fluttered and scraped along the black asphalt as the detective shivered within his fleece jacket. He was tempted to pull his head in and bury his broad nose in its zipped up collar, but he refused. Not while the out of towner was standing stoically in front of him like the first lick of winter was meaningless against his exposed neck. The detective cleared his throat instead, turning his head away from the interloper and looking at a pumpkin topping a trash pile at the end of the lane edging the property. It was childishly carved with the lopsided face of a cat becoming almost menacing as it decayed in on itself. Halloween was over, a damp New England affair with kids wearing parkas and slick raincoats over their costumes.

But not entirely.

"I want the ownership history; legal documents, liens or other problems with the property. I would like it all before your offices close for the day and I would most certainly like it before sundown, when I have other plans. Time is not something I generally care to waste." The man's voice was clipped and elegant, almost English but somehow not quite. "It's problematic, I realize. It's a commercial facility with recent public use, therefore it will be a tangled matter. So my most efficient suggestion, detective, is that you simply step out of my way. I will assist myself."

"Problem with that, sir, is that half of it's going to be tied up at the town library. Archives, if you get me. It's old stuff, even though the facility just shut down in the spring." He managed to not sound grudging. The creepily pale special investigator had been a relentless living thorn in his heel since he drove into town that morning in a crappy airport rental at odds with the expensive airs he put upon. But the man's credentials cleared and the detective was tired of the frenzy the locals were whipping up. Last week's town hall had been enough for him even without all this. With the holiday ahead, every old biddy and young granola nut had seemed to crawl out of the woodwork to air concerns about things they think they saw on the condemned property. As they did every year. Property owner hadn't bothered to show again. Didn't even know who it was anymore. Maybe that was for the best.

Then the fire happened. Jesus Christ, the fire. _That_ put the cat on the pigeons. If he inhaled hard enough to get past the dead leaves, he could still pick it up from here at the very edge of the property and past the bus lot. A rank mix of burning wood and plastic, charred metal and scorched paper. And whatever chemicals the janitorial staff left on the property. If he glanced to his left, he could see county officials finishing up the final air test. Probably not much to worry about, though a facility this size had enough chlorine and bleach on hand to be worth a check. Especially in the tight halls. Fire had only taken a part of one of the wings. Residential bunks, already stripped down to bare walls and bolted frames. No great loss.

None of _them_ wanted to be there when the sun went down. Bunch of chicken littles among the locals.

The special investigator – Locklair, so said the thin badge he'd flashed - interrupted his wandering thoughts. "All the more reason you leave it in my hands. Libraries are a specialty of mine."

Unwillingly, the detective filtered his gaze back towards this Locklair as another knife of wind cut its way through his clothes. The man barely blinked. "Cold where you from, sir?" Nothing. Just that clear, considering look in the man's grey-green eyes. "Yeah, alright. I'll call ahead and get them to open up the record room for you at the office. Library's up till six, but if you get in the door and flash that badge, they'll hold you till at least seven or eight. After that, Jenine likes to get home for her kids."

"Thank you." Captain prim and proper here. Locklair turned away to pull a fancy-looking smartphone out of his suit's inner pocket. "That should do fine."

. . .

Loki finished snapping the last of the photos, looking over the documents he had neatly lined up atop the flaking beige file cabinets as he did so. He set the smartphone down next to the pile, picking up the pages in turn to study various bits of trivia. The sounds of munching came over the line even though the phone still showed his last few crisp pictures, his call back to base minimized in favor of the archival apps.

 _"It'll take me a few to process the rest of the docs. Enhancement's still chugging on the oldest files; good call scanning them in first."_ Munch, munch. He tried to not roll his eyes at Daisy's snacky intrusion, failed. _"I'm not saving you any pee-bee cups. If you wanted the good stuff, you should have stuck around the party longer instead of zipping off after a ghost story. If there really are ghosts riled up, they're not getting any deader."_

"They're noxious anyway." He grimaced at her mock-horrifed gasp. "If I cared, I'd think there'd be enough to last. I thought your end of year holiday revels were dreadful. I had no idea the excess involved in your odd little Saturnalia. Prioritizing Coulson's request was preferable to breathing pure sugared air for the next week."

 _"Lost me. The Saturn-what-now?"_

"It was an old Roman festival where social norms are upturned and the rules set aside. The servant becomes the master, the wise caper as madmen, so forth, until the end of the day where nothing truly changes. A safe-maker holiday, a societal valve." He set aside the last page and rested his hands well apart atop the cabinets, narrowing his eyes down at the chain of ownership. Nothing unusual jumped out at him. "Later revisited in some of your cultures as a 'feast of fools,' again with a reversal of them daily norms. What I'm getting at, Daisy, is that your corn-syrup fueled orgy is strikingly bizarre to me; most of you lot quite strictured in your day to day behavior. As befits a land founded by uptight religious zealots, to be cruelly fair. But suddenly fall strikes and ruddy _everything_ is mopped up in orange and black and bloodstained eyeballs." He snorted. "On the bright side, it makes it easier to shop for a variety of new dark shirts for a few weeks."

Silence filled the line for a moment while she absorbed that. _"I did like your crack at the party about how you already show up in costume every day."_

He tightened his lips. It was only half a joke. It was still sometimes difficult to look at a mirror and know what he truly looked like. There'd been a temptation to simply wear that hidden face into the raucous party that spilled from the rec room and down the halls of the SHIELD facility, but he found he couldn't quite bring himself to. The point of many of these reversion festivals really wasn't lasting change _._ He was still afraid showing his blue skin might cause exactly that. "I suppose I could have made a slight effort and shown up in full armor. Coulson only twitches a little when I do that, and it might have given some of the guests a nasty knock."

 _"Maybe too nasty."_

"Thought you lot liked to be scared, this time of year." He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. "I'm going to get ejected from this place in another half hour, I'd prefer to be on my way before that."

 _"Just one more moment, dude. They're finalizing. You've been on a press all day with this thing, whatcha up to?"_

"I intend to let myself onto the property for the night and continue my investigation that way." He heard Daisy shift, but he kept going before she could burble something to interrupt him. "Here's the sequence of events as I understand it so far. The property changes hands from a coal magnate who realizes he has a loser to a Tepper family patriarch in 1876. Deemed unsuitable for commercial exploitation by the burgeoning energy industries, this Tepper fellow also fails to make a go of it as a northern plantation. The parcel lies fallow for a couple decades until, quite aged at this point, Tepper makes a honeyed deal with state and local authorities. He retains ownership but it is functionally state property going forward. He gets the tax breaks and any profit, they get the usage. And then the ownership trail begins to smudge as Tepper promptly flip-flops the property's paperwork around to, I think, make even better deals out of his tax breaks before Death claims him. Meanwhile, building starts just shy of the 1910's and Llewelyn Jones Boys Academy opens its doors in the closing years of World War I."

He rummaged through the yellowing documents in another neat pile, pulling out the old, preserved newspaper clippings. These he hadn't photographed for their safety's sake. His memory would be enough. "Concerns were raised by the end of the decade. Numerous refugee children brought to the states and harbored in boarding schools like this one, and with them the seemingly ever-present rumors of abuse. Investigations turned up nothing and the academy trudged along. The circumstances repeat after World War II, only with a fraction more documentation. One boy escaped and went to a New York paper with his tale. I'll spare you the details. It's fairly lurid and comes to naught, like all the rest."

His eyes picked them out again, however. The picture was unavoidable. A young boy named only Arthur, his back covered with whip scars and the tell-tale pockmarks of burns. Arthur told the authorities a tale of children frightened in the dark by the power of authority, guards and other adults that would pull them from the rooms at night for physical abuses the boy couldn't describe without shaking, and for odd, illogical punishments like digging holes for long hours until they collapsed. And other things, besides. Things too wild for stodgy newsprint, buried and dismissed under the umbrella term 'ungodly.'

The subsequent investigation showed nothing amiss at the Academy, and the implied countercharge that the scars on Arthur had come from a father broken by the great wars. Arthur had been returned to the Academy. There was nothing more. Loki had found no leads on an online records search. Nothing to indicate what was the truth. Arthur was gone into thin air forever afterward.

"Suffice to say the pattern of accusation and absolution continues until at last the academy is marked for closure. A series of break-ins conducted by copper-thieves and other desperate miscreants begins shortly after the doors are chained shut. Then, last week, a fire at last scorches out a piece of this abandoned piece of history. But before that finale, it spent almost two decades openly dressed as a rehabilitation facility. A for-profit children's prison."

 _"Ye Olde School for Wayward Boys."_

"And through it all, the local legends begin to build of ghosts seen on the property at odd hours. In the forties, neighboring homes took to leaving candles in the windows. To light the lost on their way home well away from their imprisonment. The rumors never took root with authorities, never came to fruition. Even some few of the captured thieves regaled the police with tales of things they saw on the campus in the dark. I suspect the tangled weave of ownership plays a part here as well. But the locals were sympathetic... and too afraid to intervene openly even when that new title all but recalled the old lore. And so here, we are. Like as not a fire set by squatters by mistake, but that's not the fable sold by the papers for an extra coin or two. Coulson picks up the local news oddity of this, a fire set by furious ghosts, since he finds it funny to send me off on stranger errands when they arise. However, I find I'd like to know the why and the wherefore of all this. The little and the lost, what's true and what's not. A whimsy, if you like. A cold mystery."

There were still candles in the windows today. They were LED-bright and battery-powered now, but as he'd driven down the streets of the surrounding, almost rural neighborhood, he'd seen them gleaming white in the face of almost every old Colonial Revival house, like a glint in a drawn and drowsy eye lidded by the overbearing skeleton trees on every lawn.

 _"Sometimes there isn't a why, dude. Things just happen."_

"There's always cause and correlation, Daisy. You only have to take a longer view."

 _"Okay. So, you're really, truly, genuinely ghost-hunting. That is awesome."_

"That implies I go out there already prepared for the veiled unknown. I do not, exactly. I go with an open eye. Now tell me what I wanted to know since your machines are surely completed with their work – who owns the property today?"

 _"Untangled weave, dude. All that paperwork and we go right back to the beginning. Stephen Nicholson Tepper. Widowed, no children, one sister, deceased. He's got a legal license but he hasn't practiced since the eighties. The last living patriarch of the family, according to the family tree app. He lives on the edge of the county over on what Google Earth tells me is a super nice gated property. According to local records, he does not get involved with township politics or anything. Ever. I think your first pass pretty much got the highlights."_

Loki smiled, satisfied. "It always comes back to families, doesn't it? One more favor I'll set you to, while I work. Trawl the rest of the Tepper history for me with your access to better networks. For historical oddities, for anything that strikes your eye. Go by instinct."

 _"Need that by a certain time?"_

"I don't. It's reference work. But I'll likely check my mail in the morning and not at night. It may take an eve or two before I consider the matter completed."

 _"Tell me again you're not really ghost-hunting. Because that totally sounds like something a ghost-hunter would say."_

"I'm not hunting tonight, Daisy. There's no prey. Only, perhaps, victims." He rang off before she could tangent again, looking up at the clean grey walls and the frozen moments of township history scattered along them. Here a county clerk standing in front of some old monument of war's cost, there a dedication of the new kindergarten building. New businesses. Gardens. Historical train markers. There were no pictures of the torched academy. Not a single one.

. . .

Loki left the rented car in a safe lot several blocks away from the abandoned academy as the sun began to dip below the horizon. He checked the back seat and the trunk one more time to ensure he'd lost no stray things from his hoodie's pockets and then he began his walk down damp, leaf-strewn streets past those houses and their guiding lights in the windows. He walked slowly enough to enjoy the cool, crisp air as it cut between the old restored houses belonging to New England families with old names and older money, the palm of his hand occasionally tapping some hidden rhythm against the thick canvas duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

He was not going to ghost-hunt – true. But he _was_ arriving prepared. His way, of course.

In the bag were tightly packed necessities. A few changes of simple black clothing. A leather-bound book of blank paper, useful to shape into a grimoire at need or, likelier, a simple hand-writ record of events to come. Pens. Packets and tools of magician's trade, things like a particular knife wrapped carefully in white silk to the ever-unassuming and universal cleanser, salt. And the less-esoteric tools; a handheld scanner he'd lifted from county officials to test carbon and air quality. A ground scanner and metal detector. A small but high-powered flashlight. A phone charger, and then the other scraps of expected travel gear, including a few small bags of snacks.

None of which had candy in them, a point of private pride. That said, he _had_ done some fairly remarkable damage to the tray of (overly, in his opinion) iced brownies at the party the other night. He could have gone for a few more of those, particularly now after an unremarkable and quick meal at some anonymous local diner. Nobody was fully immune to sweets.

Loki looked at the gabled houses with a sigh, noting more than a few of them still kept their hollowed pumpkins on the porch. He passed a half-deflated plastic balloon witch with a lift of his eyebrow, noting the sad creature's green skin under her pointy black hat with bemused sympathy. Here and there were stray skeletons still on display, some human but a few animals dotted windows not taken up by the candles. He liked the plastic crow he found in a high sill, though it wasn't quite right in the details. Once he was passed by a squealing brace of children at play on the sidewalks, little girls smudged with neon monster paint along their cheeks and their arms tied with scraps of golden princess taffeta from the night before. They turned as they went by the figure in black, attempting to utter creepy noises and he flashed his fangs back at them in a responding snarl that lacked any real malice. They cheered him, unafraid, then disappeared down and around the corner to another street.

Above the shingled roofs and underneath the glooming autumn sky he could see the top of the academy just another street over. The neighborhoods bordered it close on most sides, a grandfathered situation from the days when it was supposedly just a school. Tall layers of brick wall and razor wire coils keeping the former youth prison separated from the world beyond, gaping only for the side lot and the main entry. He had to jog over to a now disused lane to get the front gate, using a small brick-lined path that fed off the terminus of a dead-end street.

The black steel bars were open, and at this hour there were no police cars left to halt his entry. The detective's grumbling resistance to the local legends aside, no one else was volunteering to stay. He let himself in easily, ignoring the squeal of the flaking gate as he pushed it shut behind him. That would be enough to let him know if he was about to be interrupted.

The academy had a face, and he regarded it plainly. The screaming maw was the wide front entrance with its bolted double doors of heavy wood and strip-steel flung open to the chill air, set underneath the single spire permitted under the rules of its red brick neo-gothic architecture, and it had dozens of eyes that stared emptily at its approaching visitor. Ripped curtains flapped out of more than a few, and cracking plastic slat shades, and here and there the dirt and broken pottery of forgotten plants. No light reached them, and he could see with his own sharp eyes the wilting remnants spilling free for a last chance in the open air. They would strangle in the coming winter, the last gasp of life in the dead building.

He could barely see the far wing where the fire started from the entrance, a much newer structure that squatted on the academy's flank like a boil. He'd already seen the publicly available floor plans. An attempt had been made to fit the only decades old residential wing – more like a barracks – with the rest, modern steel covered hastily with bricks too garish to blend with the wind-slapped rest.

The foyer was startlingly pleasant despite its stripped decay, a warmly painted, almost rococo-style scrap of old Victoria framed on either side by tall staircases whose dark wood bannisters were now chipped and abused. Mismatched squares of wood along the walls showed where large oil paintings once hung. All gone. None of them had been found in the library's stores either, Loki noted. Across from the little alcove that hugged the entrance was a beautiful brick fireplace. He crossed the long room and put his hand above ashy logs. Cold, as he expected. He could sense a whisper of air coming from down the long chimney as if it breathed.

He put his duffel bag down by the mantle and turned to regard the room again. Pretty. Comforting. A welcoming lure, no doubt putting a number of parents at ease about their children's fate. But the still-lingering quality of the room told him there simply wasn't that much traffic here throughout the years. The residents saw a room like this once as they entered – and then perhaps again as they left.

He thought of Arthur, the disappeared boy. If they were lucky.

. . .

Clouds lit silvery grey by a high moon peeked in the windows at Loki as he rustled through left behind papers in one of the administrative offices. He ignored the prickling feeling that followed the light. Almost everything useful had been carried away. What was left were scraps of contraband; student papers that had been taken away for being disruptive notes or what were labeled 'improper drawings.' Some of those he looked at for a while, relics of children that had survived old wars. The younger ones drew looping shapes in black crayon, earning themselves long talks with now-anonymous health disciplinarians according to attached notes. In some of them he saw crudely sketched prone bodies within the black smoke. The name scrawled on one such paper was that of a Polish child. The year on the file was 1943.

The older children drew weapons, or fire, or self-portraits of themselves screaming. Those he looked at the longest, disturbed. It didn't matter the decade. Patterns repeated. He could attach most of them to the varying wars or economic changes. The most recent were also the most obscure. Children of the eighties and nineties, still haunted by something. Many of these pictures featured intricate grey bars.

The eldest of all eras drew nothing at all, but still had their names marked in the abandoned disciplinary reports. They'd stopped screaming, it seemed. They ate themselves quietly instead. Like good, stoic children ought.

Loki took a handful of the papers back down to the main halls to continue his study as the moonshadows grew longer along the gaping windows and found shapes to make against the dark, ignoring the snapping wind as it curled inward to snarl up inside the building. He watched them from the corner of his eye, looking at the way they quivered and whirled along the floor. He pulled an apple from the duffel bag, giving it a contemplative crunch before setting the papers in his other hand down on the seat of one of the abandoned chairs that littered the room. "I see you," he said, utterly calm. He didn't turn around.

Leaves skittered along the staircase behind him, a rustling noise chased by a sudden shriek of nighttime wind. When he glanced over his shoulder at steps now warping from nature's exposure, the littlest shadow was gone.


	2. Disintegration

2\. Disintegration

. . .

Full dark. The stars ducked behind the clouds, and there weren't any more shadows coming in from outside. All of them were inside now with him, and Loki flared his nostrils at the scent of dust and decay where it filled the long hallways that connected the old building and the new. His ears pricked, barely catching the soft, plaintive whisper when it came from a doorway behind him. The little shadow, chasing after his longer one. Both just as black.

 _"Are you going to make me leave?"_

"It's not safe for you to stay much longer." Again, Loki didn't turn around. He put his hand on a door's cracking frame, looking at the remnants of a small classroom on the other side of the threshold. "They're going to demolish before the chance of snow gets much worse. I've seen the paperwork and soon I'll see more. It'll be quite soon, I'm afraid. The fire hastens their planning, perhaps."

 _"I've got nowhere else to go."_ The boy's thin, unearthly voice carried a real, almost living note of fright.

"What's your name?" He lifted his chin, looking at the hole in the room's ceiling. Wood shards and tufts of insulation splintered inward, falling slowly into a pile not far from where a teacher would have once stood. Silence answered him from behind. Gone again. He smiled, considering the dead child's skittishness and how best to deal with it. "I'll tell you stories if you come back."

His senses prickled again, a touch of chill along the back of his hands, a whisper of something at the edges of invisible ether. He looked back down the hall and this time he saw a scrap of the boy peeking just around the steel framed corner. The eye that regarded him was fully dead black, pale stringy hair flopped down along a clammy-looking brow. Blue lines ran along his few visible features, cold nerves just under the waxy skin and brought to light under the moon. Not Arthur, he could tell that much. That long ago lost boy had been darker and fierce-eyed, and with a sharper nose to boot. "I'll tell you three, two borrowed and one my own. A fair price for traded knowledge where I come from."

 _"What do I have to do?"_

"Stay. And tell me your name."

 _"I can't."_ The black eye looked away, down the hall. The blackness was glazed with real terror. _"I'm not alone. I can't! It's going to start soon."_ The little round face disappeared before Loki could ask what that meant.

He didn't have to wait long for an answer. He started to move down the hall, cautious to not startle the shadow wherever it was now, but before he reached the far doorway he heard it. Something huge gurgling in the dark, gasping as if desperate for breath. He laid a hand on the cracking wallpaper where it was peeling away from buried fine wood, for a second himself confused as to whether it was the building itself inhaling or not. Another rush of cold air followed the exhale, and he turned to watch scraps of paper and coils of dirt get picked up by the relentless wind. Things began to slap against walls and he pressed his back against that peeling print when a nearby window slammed shut of its own accord.

He was not frightened. His eyes narrowed against the naturalistic onslaught, determining its source as best he could. _It,_ said the boy. Very well, what was 'it,' truly? He saw only the same shadows that had followed him along to this wing of the building, so he crept carefully around the corner when the rush of wind paused for another slow inhale. He saw nothing, sensed the distant presence of the unnamed child not far from a broad hallway window that opened onto back fields lined by trees and bordered by high walls.

There from that glassy place he saw it. Shadows slithering along the grass and stone, dozens of them seething along the forgotten earth. Living memory, trapped in a scramble of moments. As he lifted his head he could smell a cold mix of minerals carried on the air, lifeless loam and drying grass. And underneath that the bitter tang of chemicals, not all of them the ordinary things a janitor might bring. He contemplated that as the squall began to ease. The wail in the night found no victim to feed on him, so it pulled away. Outside, the dark things still shivered along the wildness that had taken over a once-lushly cared for rolling lawn. He studied them for a while, even as the air tried to chill against his tougher skin, even as shadows licked his immobile profile.

 _"You're not scared."_ Closer now. He caught the outline at the edge of his vision, tiny bony hands clutching the edge of a toppled desk.

"I don't frighten easily any longer. Do you want to hear the stories or no?"

The little figure wavered but didn't disappear. _"I want to. I like stories. We used to tell stories in the dorms at night when we were scared and couldn't sleep. But I can't pay like you said."_

Loki reached up and pulled the window shut. The boy jumped into shadows as wood slammed a little too hard into its base, but with the wind gone the tension in the air all around him seemed to ease. "The first requirement is to stay, that's all. Don't run off again. I'm not frightened, so you don't have to be. If I ask a question that you can answer, try. As for your name, consider it owed. We'll address it later."

He got no answer, but his senses still found the boy nearby. "I'm going downwards since the charming late show is over. There's another archive below the main offices. I want to look at it. Follow me, and I'll talk."

That got a reaction. _"Don't go down there. Anything below ground is bad."_

Loki shrugged. "I'm worse," he said. "Come along, now."

His ears caught a hesitant step forward in his wake as he turned. Good.

. . .

Phil Coulson: The 20th Century Boy

Phil put his drink down on a sloppy plastic black and orange coaster, waving off the latest enormous plastic bowl of individually wrapped candies to make its way around this side of the rec area. "How much of this crap did we end up with? Did we just go by the pallet or what?" He had to pitch his voice loud enough to carry over the house mix of 90's rock gothica and classic Halloween tunes. He hadn't known Skinny Puppy could blend with The Monster Mash, but there it was, and no, it still couldn't.

"Too damned much, that's the precise calculation," came the dour mutter from the opposite couch. A green-grey eye peeked up from where Loki had his head rested against the back as Daisy approached. "Oh look, here's one of the guilty parties now."

"I should have got more of the M&Ms," she said by way of arrival greeting. She poked Loki in his side, hard, as she plopped down next to him. "You've got some brownie on you, dude. Did you seriously eat like half the sheet already? And now you're over here back-talking my catering skills. _Hyp-ooo-criiiite_."

"Did not." A pale hand came up to brush at his black t-shirt anyway. "Can't prove a thing."

"It's on your face." She rolled her eyes as he prodded experimentally at his lip with a fingernail and looked over at Coulson. "So, Fitz has this wild story about being in Glasgow as a kid and seeing something in a window upstairs. He's, to this day, like 90% sure he saw someone hung up there."

"Bad part is that's probably just Glasgow and not anything supernatural." Phil plucked at his unbuttoned collar, glancing over at Fitz where he was animatedly commandeering a group of engineers all telling their own tales. Mack was laughing at something he couldn't hear.

"That's what he said. That was the sucky part, couldn't talk without breaking down all the ways to debunk it at the same time. I'm like, dude, not the point right now. I don't care about air pressure in the valves or off level flooring problems. Give me the _good_ stuff." She whapped at Loki again as he snorted under his breath. "So I'm skulking around looking for real Halloween stories. You got any, Coulson?"

"I grew up in the sixties and seventies. Tripping hippies and rubber monsters were my thing. They didn't age well. Especially the hippies. I checked out a couple of my old neighbors on Facebook a year ago and damn. The brown acid adds about a decade to your face. Or they're just old. Like me."

"This all explains a great deal," muttered Loki. He was looking at a fudge smudge on his hand as if it had personally betrayed him.

"Wow, check out peanut gallery here. What is _with_ you?" Daisy exhaled at him in mock exasperation as Phil laughed.

"I am haunted by humans," Loki deadpanned. The stolen quote got him a long, cold look from her. He shrugged in response, jutting his chin across the table towards Phil. "Do you have any of these stodgy rubbery tales? Gods know, I haven't overheard anything worthwhile. I'm disappointed, what with all the oddities we normally gather around here."

Phil picked up his glass again, catching up to the genuine curiosity in Loki's voice. He blinked at the pale man over the rim of his glass, then back over to Daisy. "Well. There's _one._ "

"Spill it, dude. Come _onnnnnn._ " Daisy wrung her hands together in a plea. "Lay some Stand By Me jazz on us."

Phil shook his head with a laugh. "Daisy, how old do you think I am?"

"Old _enough_."

. . .

 _Brandon's dad had all the good stuff. He was a collector, a connoisseur, and if he'd caught the three boys rustling through the creaky longboxes to get at the crown jewels of it all, he would have beaten their ten year old asses so raw they could have been featured body horror stories. This didn't deter them for a second. The gory fantasies had their own siren call that drowned out all others and it was Jeremy that pulled them out of the dirty white box with a hiss of victory._

 _There they were. Tales from the Crypt. Vault of Horror. The Haunt of Fear. The wild heyday of the fifties, just before the decency groups cracked down on what could and couldn't be sold to kids between the pages of comic books. They still had decent stuff underground in cruddy magazine style, from Weird and Strange Galaxy, and Phil's corny out of print favorite, Witches' Tales, but nothing compared to the classics._

 _"You sure he's gonna be gone till Sunday?" asked Phil in a wavering voice, lifting up as he was sure, just SURE Brandon's dad was going to pull into the drive at that very second. When he caught the sun glinting on the washed white cement he shook for a second. Then he realized there was still nothing there._

 _"Totally. He's two states away." Brandon plopped onto his corduroy butt, gently thumbing open the pages until a lurid two page spread caught his eye. His voice had the comfort of being the kid in charge, and he was definitely not going to act like he was scared of his dad. "Oh, wow, check this out." Zombies bubbled up from underneath the porch, moss and scrawled gore spilling out of their skulls._

 _"Looks like the old Barner place," laughed Jeremy._

 _"You're just saying that because of the dare. It doesn't look anything like that dump."_

 _"It's not a dare. It's a challenge." Jeremy crossed his arms against his chest. "It's really easy now, too. Eight hours on the Barner property. No running, no screaming, and we get all the candy the club collected. Easy. Barner doesn't even live there anymore, says the big kids."_

 _Barner. Every neighborhood seemed like it had a Barner. The hostile, unwelcoming presence at the end of a musty lane, half-boarded up windows and something that probably died under the porch years ago. Barner had five acres of property, much of it still wooded despite the press of suburbia. Every summer the local kids challenged each other to camp for a night and not get caught. Every one got driven out._

 _But Barner was maybe gone this year. Moved, said some kids. Died, said others. Wasn't he gone? Nobody was quite sure._

 _The big kids also said there were still lights on upstairs sometimes. The big kids didn't win the challenge either, so they had an interest in creeping off the younger kids. Phil knew at least one of them had gotten the belt from their dad for trying, too. He winced. Not the outcome he wanted to go for. Mom was holding it together since his own Dad was gone, but he didn't want to push on her or make her worry. Something like this was on the fringe of the boundaries he was trying to set for himself._

 _Brandon flipped the pages, looking for the end of the story. "I think we should try it."_

 _"Brandon, no," said Phil immediately. "Come on. We're all going to get into trouble."_

 _"It's easy, though. And I saw the box. There's EVERYTHING in it." Brandon's voice was loaded with childish avarice. "Phil, we could sneak junior mints into the shows for years."_

 _Phil frowned, trying to pretend like that didn't hit a hungry nerve. "There's not even anything good coming out."_

 _"I saw a poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's coming out next month, looks really good. Junior mints, Phil. He had full Hershey bars, too."_

 _He gaped. He knew the poster Brandon meant, the almost fleshy one-sheet with a masked man wielding the chainsaw itself while a woman screamed in the background. Hershey bars. Damn. "We can't get into that show! It's for adults!"_

 _Jeremy chirped up. "Yeah, we can. Mary's got a boyfriend who can get us in. He works there on weekends."_

 _"You hate your sister." Phil scrabbled for a way out despite his own temptations._

 _"And she hates doing chores. I pick up everything for a couple weeks and we get in to whatever we want. Come on, don't chicken out. Tell your mom we're sleeping over and we'll do it. We won't get caught. Nobody's gonna catch us." Jeremy reached over and shook Brandon's shoulders. "I'm in! Let's do it!"_

 _Phil knew when he was outgunned. He took the last card he had, played it weakly. "I'll see if I can sleep over. I might not be able to."_

 _"Your mom lets you do anything," said Brandon in a huff, not noticing Phil's wince. He continued, obliviously cruel. "I'm sorry about your Dad, but you totally got to do everything you wanted this summer. That's really cool."_

 _"No it isn't," he tried to whisper. His friends didn't hear him. It was okay. They just didn't get it._

 _. . ._

 _Phil kept an eye on the house visible through the tight knot of trees as he kept lugging the plasticky old sleeping bag up the small hill. There was a dip right on the other side, what Brandon called a 'defensivible position.' Phil didn't have the heart to correct him. He knew what the word the other boy really wanted was. When he wasn't reading horror comics, he liked the military ones, too. So he did the actual job of keeping an eye out, looking for hunters and bear traps and pretending there were tripwires all along the crackly, twiggy ground where they were going to camp for the night. The sun was already mostly down, but there was just enough orange gleam catching along the earth to make it easy._

 _"We're safe, commandos," he called ahead, careful to not get too loud. "No enemy fortifications spotted!"_

 _"Well, thank God for that, Phil," said Brandon with a laugh. He got a rude gesture in response. "What are we looking for? Russkies? The Chinese?"_

 _"Aliens," said Phil, satisfied with himself and the smart way he said it. "We're gonna watch the skies tonight and look for them."_

 _"Man." Jeremy groaned, throwing his own sleeping bag across the ground at the base of a tree. "You a nut."_

 _"You're friends with me. You're a nut, too." Phil chucked his bag at him, not quite with all his still pre-teened strength._

 _"Chockfullanuts!" Brandon dove into the fray by slinging his pillow around like a mace._

 _So it was, until full night. Boys being twerps in the approaching dark._

 _. . ._

 _Eight hours, that was supposed to be the gig. Counting from when they dropped their gear in the trees, it was now two hours into the dark. Six to go. Once they caught another neighborhood kid flashing a light through the trees to see if they were really out there. They flashed back. The rules of the game._

 _Brandon wanted to play cards but that would mean turning on the little Coleman lantern and possibly getting spotted by the house. His protestations that it was totally empty and they could do whatever they want went down like a lead balloon. On this, Jeremy and Phil were allies. Safer was better, at least until it got closer to morning. But sleep was right out of the question, the kids too hyped up on the promise of winning a heavy box of sweet, delicious, free candy. Instead they sat in their crinkling and musty bags and told each other made up stories. Phil was leading on that, coming up with a wild tale of a cigar-shaped silvery thing that had jammed over the neighborhood two years ago at unbelievable speeds._

 _He wasn't lying, that was the thing. He could swear he saw it, but not to his friends. There was some wild stuff out there at night, he decided. No matter what, he wasn't going to forget things like that. He wanted the mysteries of the whole world, and that's why he kept a single eye on the house even while Brandon was telling a janky, easily debunked lie about something that happened in the cafeteria. Brandon loved to read the good stuff, but his imagination... not so hot._

 _His own was constantly on fire._

 _Phil's hand snapped out and grabbed Jeremy's arm when the kid was mid-sentence on something he'd stopped listening to. "Look," he said urgently. "Oh crap, you guys, look."_

 _The porch light on the front of the Barner house was on._

 _Brandon stared down the small hill at it, craning his head for a better look and not really improving anything. "Maybe it's one of those new automated things?"_

 _Phil couldn't stop snapping at him. They were all going to get it. No way they went eight hours. "You know what that place looks like, that's not automated! Barner's still here." Barner, almost supernatural with how well he could sniff out kids squatting for the night on the property. "What if he went to get a new dog?"_

 _Jeremy whirled on him, annoyed with his sudden rising fear. "You hear a dog, Phil?"_

 _"You can teach them to not bark until they go in for the kill!" He snarled it right back, jerking around when he realized Brandon was standing up. "Get down!"_

 _"Other lights are going on."_

 _"Wh-" Phil struggled to his own feet in surprise. His friend was right. He thought it was a kitchen light that went first. Then one in another room. Then three windows upstairs lit up. "Okay, the hell with this, I'm out."_

 _"Candy, Phil. We haven't gotten found." Brandon was turned away from the house to stare at him._

 _"You want to get smacked on Sunday, Brandon, you have fun with that!" He moved to go, already deciding he didn't care about his bag, he didn't care about anything except not being the one in trouble, when Jeremy all but slammed into him. "Hey!"_

 _Jeremy pointed at the house with a shaking hand. "They went out again."_

 _"Okay." Phil took in a shaky breath and hunkered down, pulling Jeremy with him. The other boy huddled up beside him. He realized with an unpleasant crawling sensation that he'd somehow just gotten nominated group leader now that_ something _had hit the fan. Not for the first time, either. He swallowed and thought. "Okay, that's... maybe it is normal."_

 _"What about that is normal?"_

 _He calmed down as his brain went to work. "Because maybe he did hear us. Or heard something, anyway. What do YOU do when you hear something weird in the house? Hide under the bed, scaredy cat, or go around checking all the rooms with the lights on?"_

 _Brandon grimaced._

 _"But the lights went out again. So he didn't find anything. So we relax, and keep quiet, and think about that big box of candy, okay? Or we sneak out of here right now and call it." Honestly, he preferred the latter at this point, but he had to think for three now. Even in his mental scenario he decided to outvote himself._

 _Two nods matched his. That was okay. That was all right. He could deal. He took a breath and tried to decide how they were going to handle the next few hours._

 _Then the smell hit, crawling downwind towards them somehow. From the house, maybe, but it felt like it was all around them._

 _"Oh no," Jeremy groaned, his nose finer than the other two. "I'm gonna puke."_

 _Phil reeled back on his heels, stunned by the sudden presence of the scent. It was the richest, ripest thing he'd ever encountered. Almost wet, redolent with spoiled meat that had been left out too long in summer heat. Something acrid, almost chemical after that, threatening to sear the hair right out of his nostrils. He could picture a fleshy, horrible thing like an unbodied and too-full stomach, at the very edge of bursting all its contents all over the ground. He gagged, stumbling first along the ground in a crawl, then forcing himself back up onto his knees. It was a start._

 _He wanted fresh air, a bizarre conundrum in the open forest. He clawed at his throat and that's when he realized the path they'd taken to the campsite was blocked by a figure only a few yards away. "Oh my god," he managed, his throat clogged with the threat of vomit. "We gotta go, we gotta go."_

 _The figure smashed something against the trunk of a tree, hard enough to make all its leaves shiver. It yelled at them, an almost insensate roar. Phil couldn't make out what was being said, not at all. He took a hand from his throat to pull at the seemingly frozen Brandon._

 _Brandon unstuck himself at Phil's touch and flung himself through the trees, his arms windmilling wildly around him. "Brandon!" yelled Phil. Crap. At least it was hard to get lost. Unless they went too far north, where the subdivisions hadn't gotten their hooks in yet. Jeremy went next, all but hauling Phil along._

 _He tore free and got himself onto his feet, whirling back as the figure started hooting and slamming against the trees again. He got a look at what was in his hand, a filthy crowbar marked with rust and glistening with something he couldn't identify._

 _That was it. His ten year old brain checked out. The hell with all the candy in the world. He booked it out of the woods as fast as he could, running, trucking in great leaps until they burst out of the edge of the trees. He ended up collapsing on a cracked square of sidewalk to whoop up a wild, frightened retching noise._

 _No junior mints, he decided. He was off those forever._

 _. . ._

Daisy looked at him, unimpressed. "Dude. You know Barner was probably just a garbageman, right? Your story kind of sucks."

"Okay, nobody gets to pick on me the rest of the night." Loki slumped against the side of the couch to eye her disapprovingly. "Who was _just_ going on about debunking stories?"

"Yeah, but, it's totally obvious." Daisy shrugged. "He was probably out of town for a while for, who knows, the annual garbageman convention. You guys showed up when he came back and he was like 'by god, get these kids off my lawn.' Of course he stinks like the dead. Everything else was you whipped up by those crappy comics."

Phil grinned at her, reaching down to the table to pick up his drink. "You're in the ballpark. Barner _was_ a garbageman."

"Okay?"

"Barner also got picked up by state and federal police two months later for murder. Three hitchhikers in two states that they knew of, and that's all I got told then after we got into the worst trouble of our lives for that stunt. I dug up the rest when I was in college and got access to a database. Feds had him likely for four more. One of the unconfirmed dead was picked up just before that night in the woods. I found the story we told to the local sheriff in the files with a whole lot of notes on it I still kinda wish I hadn't read. Wasn't enough to get us called for witnesses, though. The crowbar I saw? Yeah, probable murder weapon."

Daisy froze, her mouth stuck in the unmistakeable shape of the words _oh crap._

"So, not a ghost story. I got the cheap slasher flick, complete with jump scare." Phil took a sip. "And I never did see _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre._ Kind of lost my taste after that. Kept my interest in everything else, though."

"Including aliens, I note with some tired grace," said Loki. He smirked as Phil tipped his glass towards him in silent acknowledgment. "Grim enough to pass for the night's festivities, I suppose."

"That's my best shot. What you got?"

It was Daisy that put her hand up.

. . .

Loki shoved the scanner back in his pocket, narrowing his eyes down at the warping floorboards of the archival sublevel. Nothing lay below them except packed dirt and old pipes. He picked the small flashlight out to replace the device, turning on its incredibly jarring highbeam light and flicking it into the corners. He paused when he found the edge of the boy half-hidden behind one of the rusted cabinets filled with rotting lesson plans. The black eye stared at him, the tight face still processing Phil's charming little tale of butchers in the dark. "I see they all but forgot to clean out this room," he said, attempting to draw the shadow out. His nose told him other things, but he started with a gentle lie. What he needed wasn't here. But there might be a riddle's fragment in what the boy could tell him.

 _"_ _They remembered,"_ came the whisper. _"The important stuff is gone. We're gone. They did it all at night. Nobody could stop them."_

He flicked the beam away when the boy huddled further away from the light. The smell of old blood grew stronger, its own lingering ghost. "What did they do to all of you in here?"

A rustle answered him, the flickering electric sense of passing ether. The boy was gone again. Loki shook his head, lifted it when a soft orange gleam picked up at the top of the wall. Dawn was slinking towards him, trailing the first gleam of light along the now dusty floor. He switched off the flashlight. He could draw the boy out in the day, but not easily. Not worth the strain on the trapped little figure. He swapped the flashlight around and put his hand in his other pocket, feeling the chilly metal presence of his phone. May as well call Daisy instead of waiting around.

. . .

 _"_ _Could you not wait until I was on my second cup of coffee?"_

"It's a dull hour, I thought to spin it up a little." Loki slumped against the rented car as dawn became a full and crisp morning, glancing casually up and down the street for anyone to take an interest in the gorecrow stranger. "Teppers, Daisy. Anything good?"

 _"_ _Depends on your perspective. Coleman Tepper, the guy who first got the property off the would-be coal dude died before the academy opened up for biz, yeah, but... He LITERALLY died just before it, like exactly one week before. They buried him on the property in some sort of really fast ceremony with just the family and his lawyer and a few interesting specifically invited buds. If you go... according to this thing... like all the way to the back west corner of the property you should find a memorial stone. He's under it. His kids and their kids and errybody reportedly have a clause in the will that says that every year they gotta go pay respects or they're cut off. That does include Stephen, the last living Tepper."_

He made a noncommittal noise.

 _"_ _No sale? Alright. I looked up the friends that showed at the funeral gig because you said 'go with your instincts.' Bunch of society types, a couple from London, a couple from New York, a couple from Boston, you get the show. They're all tied together in two ways. First, their public friendship with Old Man Tepper. They helped him flop around the property deed some years before the big sleep, looks like. Shaved a few more percentage points off his taxes to the tune of a cool few mill, a pretty wild number then. The second, I've got a handful of online documents suggesting these specific dudes were all in the same secret society."_

"Now you get my attention."

 _"_ _Then you'll love this. They were all part of one of the last remaining Hellfire Clubs at the end of the 19_ _th_ _century."_

He quirked an eyebrow, absorbing that thoughtfully. "Oh gods, the poncy pretenders at ritualistic evil in the dark. The good old days of edgy nonsense. I thought that went out of style in the 1700's."

 _"_ _Did, although your good historical buddy Aleister Crowley kicked off some new interest when he was keeping it weird. Do What Thou Wilt, etc etc. It's his influence that guided any new club that from then on. Sex, drugs, rollin' dirty for fun. I'm also checking to see if any of the later Teppers joined up. Betting they did, because these groups mean money, and those kids kept a whole lotta money in their pockets through generations. You want me to call Strange for kicks?"_

"I absolutely do not want that. Can you get a copy of the will that Tepper bound his descendents to, regarding the property and his memorial?"

 _"_ _Legally, no. Realistically? I'll have it by lunch."_

 _. . ._

Loki examined the last photo he took, then discarded it for another attempt. The sun was high in a clear blue sky, making it difficult to catch a sharp snap of the face of the polished granite monument set into the still-tended parcel of earth at the back of the academy property. The thing was exactly where Daisy said it would be, a bulky memorial kept so fastidiously clean it shined more like metal than stone. He suspected a burial vault lay under the broad stone. He clicked the shutter button on his phone again, studying the results with more satisfaction as he noted nothing awry. Details mattered, but all he saw was the mundane indicia of the human dead.

When the lunch hour came around and Daisy's prompt email attachment with it, he was back in the small county library's archives, fussy Jenine wringing her hands at him as he pulled annual geological survey maps of the land to spread them around the records room for study. Mostly each passing year showed the same progress. Old Man Tepper's business deal was for land deemed useless as a coal mine. They'd dug, and they'd dug, and they'd found naught of value. Tepper thought the turned earth might be useful for planting. It wasn't. Much later, they'd had to coat it with new layers of imported loam and grass seed. A major expense, repeated every few decades.

There were still tunnels dotting the earth underneath the Academy, a structural decision no one would let them get away with today. Well, Loki considered dourly as he considered what the maps showed him. Not without bribery involved.

And Arthur, long dead Arthur, talked to the papers about digging long into the night. Digging until the children collapsed. He studied the dates on the memorial without real interest, believing he already knew where some of the lost lads ended up. He'd long since put aside doubts that horrible things had happened in the academy after dark, though he didn't quite know the shape of them yet. "But that's not all the story, is it?" he muttered for his own benefit. "That's not what ties this ghost down. The shadows certainly, the old echoes of pain that aren't really ghosts themselves, but not the boy. He's something else, a full and conscious specter. Doesn't fit."

Nor did the will's restrictions on the clan's future. Lawyers were given the right to pen in the name of the current family patriarch, and he was the one bound to visit the memorial and ensure its care each year, as autumn approached. The scheduled date didn't match the fire nor much else. A random circumstance.

He needed more information before he could make any sort of tactical move. Before there was another fire, or something worse. He needed the boy to talk.

. . .

The scorched main entrance to the newer wing was collapsed in on itself, the moonlight peeking in through the cracks along a window. Loki lounged carefully against the wall a few feet away from where it tried to cave forward under the stress of the damage ahead. He was certain it hadn't been like that the day before, when he'd taken a quick scouting trip around the building in the wake of his first encounter with the shadow on the stairs. An annoying delay, nothing more. "Did you do that?" He turned to catch the tail end of that shadow as it ducked away from his sight. "Come now."

 _"_ _I can't,"_ said the boy, hesitant. _"I can't do anything like that. I slept all day. I don't remember anything."_

Loki knew a lie when he heard one. It was both talent and gift.

 _"_ _I want to hear another story. Can I? I won't run. I promise."_

That much was true. He crossed his arms against himself. "If you can't remember your name, I'll need to ask other questions to make it up."

The figure shifted his weight, the action soundless in the still, chemical-scented air. _"I don't know."_

"I'll tell you the second story, but you have to tell me after what happened to the boys after dark. Tell me what you saw. What you remember."

 _"_ _I don't want to."_ Something began to rustle in the hall behind the boy, like air being sucked through sharp teeth.

"If the wind rises, I won't be able to tell you my tales. And you want the last one. My story. It's a new one, not one I've told anybody before."

 _"_ _Tell that one first."_

"No." Loki said the single word implacably.

 _"It's not my fault! I can't do anything about the wind!"_ Either to prove a truth or a lie, the rushing, sucking sound became a scree. Shades began to rattle against distant windows in open threat. The boy's own thin voice began to rise fit to match. _"Leave us alone!"_

"No more stories if I do, and in time only the bulldozer's growl to keep you company. You can bargain or you can be alone. Do you truly wish to be alone?"

 _"I don't,"_ came the wail. With it, the soft exhale of the building. A shudder of defeat. _"Please, no, I don't."_

"Promise, then. A name or a story, the bargain stands."

The promise came in a ghastly, hollow sob.

. . .

Daisy Johnson: The Bells of Saint Agnes

Daisy's hand drifted back down to her lap, where she clasped both together with a grin. "Totally got a story, and it's better than The Zodiac Garbageman Killer. Quicker, too."

"We'll be the judge of that." Loki leaned forward to take a refill off the whiskey bottle in Phil's hand, glancing up for a moment as the deep thrum of some old Sisters of Mercy track got turned up momentarily far too high. "And mind you, I'm a picky judge."

" _Noooooo_ , not you. You're so easygoing and low maintenance. You'd never get dramatic over campfire stories." She stuck her tongue out at him.

"See, blatant sarcasm is like those overly iced brownies. Still rather fun, but you've got to dial it back for a more refined taste. Let the acid really breathe in the air, lend it a sharper edge. Of course, patience is not everyone's first virtue. But at least it isn't my _last._ " He smiled amiably, the corners of it pulling wider and cheerfully half-feral when she popped a rude gesture at him to show he'd given a successful demonstration.

. . .

 _Saint Agnes was the solid place in between, the unwanted harbor between families that didn't keep her and didn't try. In those dry weeks with the ticking old cuckoo clocks and the antiseptic smell of freshly cleaned Jesus, her name was always the same and she always hated it._

 _Mary Sue Poots, that's what they stuck on her. Ugh. She hated the sound of it in her ears and blamed an unseen maker for it personally. When the nuns weren't around to see and punish her for it, she stuck both middle fingers up at the waxy old crucifix in the first act of defiance she could call her own. The other was the name she wrote in the margins of all her notebooks. The name she chose for herself, the one she picked looking up at stars and clouds. Skye. For her, that was freedom. She kept it close to herself, but someday, someday, that was going to be all hers. If she had a real name, she didn't know it. So choosing freedom would do._

 _She was fourteen supposedly, felt younger, felt older somehow too. Out of place, out of joint. The other girls in the orphanage didn't chum up with her much. They knew she was going to be gone only to come back. She was half their ghost already, so she was surprised when one of the older girls yanked her by the hand into the tiny group room well after dark. "We need another!" said this one. Becky, that was her name. Another mousy older girl nobody wanted, sweet natured and puggish._

 _"For?" asked Skye, pissed off already at being grabbed around._

 _"For the game, Jesus, keep up." Becky stuck her head out the door to look for the nuns before pulling back in. Behind her, two other girls giggled. "We need the four corners for this. I saw it in a movie."_

 _"Dude, what?" Skye craned around her and her bulky grey sweater to look at the rugged piece of cardboard the girls were putting the finishing touches on. Oh, come on. She tugged at a chunk of hair along her face, twirling her finger in the end of it nervously. "Okay, Sister Slam is going to have all your butts if you're doing what I think you're doing. That is really stupid, guys."_

 _Sister Slam was Sister Mary Samantha; true believer, holy terror, and would absolutely tweak her crap eternal if she found out her charges were handmaking an Ouija board in the dorms. The two other girls looked up and giggled. "But that's the fun! Look, it's all nonsense. Probably."_

 _"So what's the point?"_

 _"Well," said Cait, the youngest of the group and somehow the most domineering. "You know the old story about the bloody nun?"_

 _Skye rolled her eyes at the obviousness. Everybody in Agnes knew about the bloody nun. The ghost of a holy sister who'd stayed by the sick during one of the cholera outbreaks in the 19_ _th_ _century, only for it to take her alongside her charges. Martyred for the needy and the ill, and still haunting the place because she felt her work wasn't done. Supposedly harmless, but she was a great story to spook the new kids with. "She's not real."_

 _"One of the boys said he actually heard her, like, years ago. Some blind kid, over on the other side. Matty, I think his name was. He had like some sort of panic fit, I was told. They're closer to where she's supposed to haunt, anyway. We're gonna try to talk to her. If she doesn't cough for us, she isn't real. We're ghost-busting. Come on, don't be a turd. Help us out."_

 _Skye wavered. She could just walk. It was silly, literally the silliest thing she'd seen all year. But. They asked for her help. They could have just asked anyone, it's not like it mattered that it was her. But when did she ever get to hang out with anyone? Fine, sure. She shrugged, pretending like it was no big deal, she hung out with spirits every day. "Yeah, alright. Yank me a chair, let's do this."_

 _. . ._

 _It was, she decided, the most disappointing hour of her life thus far, and that included the build-up to her first kiss and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. A bunch of garbled gibberish, one obviously controlled dare to lick the portrait of Father Frankie in the lobby, and not a single spooky thing. The other girls gave it their best shot, but Becky crawled onto the ugly couch with its pooching soft guts and conked out when the bloody nun didn't give up the goods after twenty minutes. The other two wandered off as it got late, leaving Skye fiddling with the cardboard planchette and its thumbtack base. "So stupid," she muttered._

 _She got up and tugged the yellowing granny square afghan off the back of the couch and onto Becky's feet when she realized the crackly vent along the ceiling was hitting the sleeping girl dead on. Then she shoved the makeshift oracle into a box full of magazines and other near-contraband the nuns let the girls get away with, hoping someone, maybe Cait, would have the good sense to get rid of it in the morning._

 _Skye crept out of the room, already knowing where every creaky board was and all the blind corners where a nun could sweep by and catch her up to what they always assumed was no good. Feeling vaguely protective, she closed the door to the little group room behind her and tip-toed up the hall to the junction that would get her back to her own dorm._

 _Something prickled along the back of her neck, trying to make the roots of her long hair stiffen, reacting to something she realized wasn't quite right. At the t-section was one of the big painted glass windows that looked out on the busy street of the city and she got up on her toes to look out above one of the dark chunks._

 _The prickling sense became confusion and then full blown fright. The street was usually full of pedestrians on their way to bars or groceries or local dive restaurants, with an off-kilter traffic light strung across the corner. The building across the way would be lit up for business, people moving back and forth behind the windows at all hours. Street-lights making some of the orphanage halls permanently semi-daylit no matter the time._

 _There was absolutely none of that going on._

 _Every light she could see was out. She pushed harder against the window, trying to look up at the sky and see the stars. Clear black night. Nothing more. Not even an airplane. Not aware her breath was coming shallower now, she stretched as tall as she could to try and see someone, anyone out on the streets. Above her, an old lightbulb buzzed and crackled._

 _She had power. No one else did. There was nothing out there. It was like seeing a dead world and the sickly sense that she could run back to the group room and no longer find Becky there was an almost physical thing._

 _Skye whirled, feeling a need to do exactly that. To know. To assure herself it was just some sort of blip in the grid and a weirdly quiet hour. Becky would be there. Totally. It was totally okay. She tried to breathe, then realized the next awful thing._

 _The hallway she'd just come down seemed like it was gone. Her eyes widened to try and absorb the darkness she was seeing. The wide, dimly lit corridor always ended down at the far way with a blackened bronze statue of some saint she could never remember the name of. But right now it was only shadows. No saints. No hall. Only a wall of impenetrable blackness._

 _She was gasping now, her back against the glass and her eyes stuck open like they'd been pinned. As she stared, frozen, terrified, the shadows began to whirl and dissipate. She could see the outline of the saint begin to emerge again from behind the presence. It did nothing to ease her tension, instead her breath caught in her throat as something drifted by her shoulder._

 _So soft, so quiet, almost imperceptible. A single wet cough._

 _Her heart skipped a beat, then tried to lunge out of her chest. Another cough, louder, and in it she would swear, absolutely swear she heard words._

you're not safe here. you're not safe anywhere.

 _She ran, socked feet thudding against the floor right back up the hall, flinging open the door she'd just shut, scaring the absolute hell out of Becky, who jerked upright out of her dead sleep to stare at her. Headlights from the street below flickered in through the dirty window above the couch. Skye barely noticed the world outside was back, yelled over the sound of clanging bells of Saint Agnes as they tolled the midnight hour. "Don't ask, don't ask me a goddamn thing. We're getting rid of the board. Right now."_

 _"Mary-"_

 _"NOW! NOW! NOW!"_

 _. . ._

 _She told Becky what she saw, the night before she was fostered out yet again. Becky hugged her. Whispered in her ear the one thing she needed to hear. "I believe you."_

 _She never saw Becky again. The first real friend she'd made at the orphanage, gone like the rest a few weeks later. She could have looked for her on the Internet. She was afraid to. In a way, Skye decided she didn't really want to know what happened to the girls who managed to get out of the orphanage._

 _But at least she'd been believed._

 _And she never snuck out of her room at Saint Agnes at night again. It wasn't safe. She believed. Sometimes she had nightmares about going back, being trapped in the halls. With the crawling dark, and the soft wet sound of the bloody nun coughing, unable to save her._

 _. . ._

Loki looked evenly at her. "Wasn't the board."

"Oh. My God." At her disgusted voice, Phil started to laugh behind his hand. It threatened to turn into coughing but he decided to try real hard to not allow that. Daisy looked a little wired from telling her tale.

"Simply wasn't the board. You don't tap into etheric soulstreams like that, it's just not so easy that a bunch of children are going to stumble into the fringe of that black brink." He shrugged as she glowered. "A toy, a piece of trash. As you say, subconscious writing and a healthy dose of tricking your friends." He sipped at his glass, then tipped it in a conciliatory gesture. "But I believe the rest of it."

Her ire eased off as she leaned back, examining him. "You do?"

"Yes. Icons can be quite the tether if faith is strong enough. I'm not certain that's what happened here, but it's not impossible in my wider experience."

Phil gestured at them both with the glass in his other hand. "Okay, so I got the slasher flick and Daisy brings unexplained religious horror to the table. What do you have?"

Loki shrugged. "Terrible, consuming curiosity. That's all I've got." He pulled himself out of the couch with a nod to the director. "If you'll excuse me, I think the music's getting worse. I'm going to go clear my head awhile in the night air."

"Come on."

He leaned down to regard Daisy as she pleaded at him. "That kind of curiosity is a much worse threat than you think. I don't scare anymore, not easily. But I used to." He snapped his fingers for emphasis and started to wander off. "Another time, maybe. Not tonight. The hour grows too late."

"Cheeeeap." Daisy threw a candy wrapper at him as he left.

. . .

Loki easily pulled the last broken chunk of rubble out of his way with a mutter. The dorm was beyond, accessible now although the stink of charred wet wood was stronger. The acrid musk of old burnt grime and thick, choking smoke, and exposed insulation besides. Something else was under it, the ghost of that meaty, heady smell that a young Phil might recognize. The deathsmell. The key to unlocking the academy's tale and the secret of the little boy was in there, the newer ward touched by fire in an attempt to... what?

He had a suspicion.

 _"I don't want to go in there."_

"We don't get the things we want sometimes, but I'll cut you some mercy tonight. This is the bargain, little boy. Come with me inside when the sun goes down tomorrow and tell your tale. I'll pay you the one more due, and then, I think, we can sort this out _properly_." He turned, the shadow forever on the fringes of his sight. Sometimes a glimpse of face, or of clammy brow, or a knot of tense and worried dead fingers, but never the whole. "But no more delays. No more rubble set in my path. You see? You can't stop me."

 _"I can't stop anybody."_ It came out in a low, anguished moan. _"I can't do anything."_

Again the rattle of choked breath along the academy's creaking halls. Loki waited until it subsided, noticing that when the exhale pushed that dead, chemical air out of the room, the boy was gone as well.


	3. Paint It Black

3\. Paint It Black

. . .

 _"So, I got the skinny on why Stephen Tepper dropped his legal practice in the eighties."_

Loki put the hot cup of coffee down on the bench next to him, glancing up and down the sidewalk as desiccated leaves skittered along his shoes. "And? Does it relate?"

 _"Might. Llewelyn Jones was a for-profit children's rehab at the end, right? Well, I got a whole lotta opinions about that sort of thing that I won't get into right now? But let's cut it down to bone and say that sooner or later, someone tries to wet their beaks the wrong way. Did you ever come across the big story in Pennsylvania in 2008?"_

"Daisy, look at me properly sometime and try to remember what I am. If it isn't supernatural, doesn't explode, isn't at all entertaining, or not directly necessary information related to my work, I truly, genuinely, could not, in any way, shape, or form, care less. I've tried to care less about earthly minutiae, see if there was some further bottom, but it would require putting myself in a coma. I called it good, my depths of uncaring. I'm satisfied with my apathy. It leaves me enough mental room for everything else I _do_ need. What happened in 2008, since now must I apparently care?" He picked his coffee back up for a long sip, glancing at a fluffy white cloud draped low in the sky.

 _"Kids for cash scandal. Big, big deal in the state. Judge was taking kickbacks from the builder of two private facilities, directly profiting them both by putting kids in a jam regardless of what they actually did to get locked up. And everybody clutched their pearls in the news, like this was an absolutely horrible thing that could totally never normally happen. Never happened before, won't happen again. Total, awful one off. My god, let's think of the children."_

"You know, I do think I'm getting a distinct taste of the shape and size of your opinions. So, let me take an enormous leap of logic and say that you've found that not only is the current Tepper still the dominant landowner, but he got a bit more legally involved with matters a couple decades ago and made a little extra cash for the bank to boot."

 _"Technically the charges went unproven, like everything else that went down in that place before it got shuttered. But he hung it up and withdrew to his super nice gated property. Keeps private otherwise, before and since. Hope that tickled your nerd brain a bit. So, whatcha in town for today?"_

"Nothing. A little fresh air, a cooked meal. I've got what I need at the facility already."

 _"_ _Usually there's a mass grave by this point if the place is as junky as it sounds like. I was going to guess you're renting a backhoe for some digging to find out. Maybe drop on me you found something on the scanner you took out of our stash."_

He smiled, the sort of grim and brutal smile used by the animal kingdom as a warning and not a pleasantry. "Oh, I'm fairly certain there is one. But if you'll recall the property's original intended use, it won't be an easy matter to unearth it. The scanner's useless here. There's a half-collapsed and abandoned mining network running underneath the whole property. Regular sinkhole bait, to be plain. I give it another decade or two if left untouched before the whole thing begins to crumble in on itself. I've seen the geological surveys and marked the changes over years. Wasn't the fire that speeds up the coming demolition, it's the tunnels. A rash of microquakes hasn't helped matters."

 _"_ _Oh my god, you think they dumped kids in the holes. Like, do you have proof they actually did get rid of them? Like the rumors say?"_

"I don't, Daisy. I think part of the core problem is that no one has ever allowed proof to survive, nothing more than the rare rumor of digging into the night. Digging for access, digging through to their own graves. They had a careful, vested interest in that caution. I can't find anything tangible in the ruins. Everything's just missing paperwork and the dismissive attitude that sells the story of children running away after wars and socioeconomic upheavals." He shifted on the bench, draping his arm along the back of it. "I've got one avenue to see if I can at least find out what happened for knowledge's sake, but it's simply not a matter that's going to be put to rest in the public eye. I'll know, and you and Coulson will know, and it will be, regrettably, all I can do from that perspective."

 _"_ _There anything you can do from other perspectives? I mean, considering ethics and whatnot, which sometimes you kinda don't."_

"Perhaps. Just perhaps."

. . .

It was a playroom meant for the younger children, a square grey brick of a room now sad and tattered, with filthy foam cubes once colored brightly jammed into corners. Young enough for such simple toys? Loki frowned as he examined the detritus, even he nettled somewhat by the implication of the unwanted youths. Stacking rings. Torn books for the earliest readers. All thrown away now. He looked up at the ceiling, the way the paint bubbled and warped from the fire.

There was the shape of the riddle, told him the first thing he needed to know. The fire _had_ started here somehow, but done the least amount of damage. Windowsills were scorched black, and the ceiling, and the door to the rest of the wing was cooked out of shape and splintery. But the contents were mostly unscathed. The floor itself utterly untouched. The boy couldn't free himself. This was his desperate attempt, now too alone with all the others gone and the place shuttered.

The hall beyond had seen the inferno, and he'd stepped carefully along support frames cooked dangerously close to ash, using magic to lighten his way across.

 _"_ _There weren't many of the really young ones."_ The boy was on the other side of the room's threshold. He wouldn't come in.

"Not much consolation, I suppose." His nostrils tingled again, as if teased by dust. Not dust, he knew. Magic. Half-tamed magic. He bent down and tugged at the forgotten square of throw carpet. No, it hadn't been cut underneath. He lifted his head and scanned the room. There. East side. They'd rolled the entirety of the cheap flooring back to the baseboard before starting. He could feel the remnants of something on the border between real and ethereal. Yes. He was right. This was the boy's tethered _locus._ Whatever had happened years ago, it had happened here.

Loki stood up, taking two long steps to the edge of the room, kneeling down again to wrap his fingers around the fraying edge of the floor.

 _"_ _Please don't."_

"It's going to be all right. That's my promise. But I need to see what was done," he said, carefully and easily pulling away the flooring to reveal the untreated wood underneath. Things shifted and moved along the floor out of the way of his inhuman strength.

There. The power that teased at his senses pulsed as he studied the haphazard lines in the wood and the dark stain in the center of it all. A poor job, but he could feel in every etched rune that the lost carver had done the best they could. "We come to the next step of our bargain. Tell me the story. Tell me what it was here, and tell me how you died."

 _"_ _It hurts."_ The boy's haunt of air rattled in the dead, dry throat, but no wind rose to defend him.

"Not for much longer. This is the first part of ritual." He looked up to spy the sliver of the white face by the door. "Do you know that, what I'm trying to do? It's a very old way of touching power, primal, open to priests and storytellers both. The Rite of the First Time Telling. By the internal logic of it, all times a tale is told is the first time, with the same power and intent layering into a weave like a book spanning time itself. This is how kings and other avatars sometimes tried to claim a God's power, by telling and living their tale so truly that they wrapped themselves in it like a mask. Incarnation, a kind of mystery play where the actors become the divine. So by telling your tale to me, we'll be living it one more time. But _I_ can give it an ending it didn't have before. Do you understand?"

The clammy brow nodded, though Loki knew that wasn't quite true for the boy. He'd died too young for a deep mage's esoterica. But the gist was simplistic enough. All children understood the rules and potential imaginative power of story. He smiled, as best he could as the pulse of power continued to thrum through the untouched floor. "Tell me now. Let's be done."

. . .

The Lost Boy: Whistle, Lad, and Never Will You Go Home

 _There were ghost stories handed down every decade, from the big kids to the little kids, long, wild tales of children trapped in the old halls and the new left behind to torment their tormentors. In the dark after lights out, the ghosts were familiar and comforting and, as every child stuck there knew, not real._

 _Nobody stopped what was going on. If they fought back, they got hurt. If they laid there and took what was to come, they got hurt. If they screamed, they went out to the back fields to dig and dig and sometimes that's when they didn't come back._

 _The worst was that it didn't happen all the time. For long months it was okay, even almost safe, as they lined up for coursework that changed with state requirements every few years and took their heavy books back to their spic and span dorms to study in cautious, careful silence. Sometimes a child would even leave to go home and small pockets of lingering resistance would cheer the free bird on his way out the door, hopefully to never come back. They didn't want visitors. Best to run, to stay loose and well far away._

 _Because sooner or later something would change in the air, and the guards would be different, with bland faces and flat emotions, and they'd know the reprieve was over. It was the culling season. Hellfire season, and sooner or later someone was going to get pulled downstairs, all the way downstairs to the room they dressed up for visitors as a record room, and what was left was going to be put in the holes. The rest would be harried and hurt, until the snows came with their mercy. They knew that story._

 _There was a man dressed in black that would come at midnight at the last edge of summer, same day every year, and the adults would all go to the far corner of the academy. The dare among the bravest was to huddle at the windows despite the guards and look at the flash of candle and torchfire at the stone monument back there that none of them liked to go near. After all, it was his fault, all of this. The Teppers, the human tommyknockers of the dead mines below. It was the living family that really haunted the academy, and everything that started in that long, hot night every year was for their purpose._

 _They'd take a boy that was sleeping, and they'd put him in the holes, screaming, screaming to look for the old man Tepper to serve him. That was the rule, the thing nobody wrote down in the will. Because the club told Tepper so; told him the way to immortality was through the young. And if it worked for Tepper, it might work for anyone. So Tepper's descendants played along and fed the tomb and the mines and nobody tried to stop it. Tepper men still died, but the rite went on._

 _Of course, the children weren't told all this. They put it together over decades. Each generation stole scraps of knowledge from things overheard in the halls. Whispers between guards and officials as the summer grew hot. The sneakiest of them got into the record halls and stole the hidden books, black books bound with leather and that smelled like dead lizards flash-cooked by hell itself. Oily stuff had been rubbed into their covers and some poor kid drew the short straw to handle it, sniffing at his fingertips for days and losing his appetite. The books told them the most, what the Teppers were trying to do, how to do it. The sacrifices. And they told other things beside, about magic._

 _It was the sixties kids that first tried to piece a defense together against the black arts of those blackest summer nights. They'd read about the kids that tried to get away and thought if they could invoke their spirits, those willful enough to try, they might come and defend the living. So they carved runes into toys and hid them around the building, they prayed and they clapped and they looked for names._

 _And at the border between summer's end and autumn's chill, the man in black came and they died anyway._

 _The seventies were hopeless years, huddling in metal beds in the brand new wing built to house the prey. But they still stole the books and spread the stories. Maybe someone else would have a better idea. Maybe someone would have an idea to make it stop._

 _. . ._

 _His name was William and he had a plan. He put it together over months, gritting his teeth and working over all the stolen notes and copied books. He went to work the very next morning after the guard and the man in black had stood right by his bed and taken the new kid sleeping in the bunk above. So new William hadn't even gotten his name. He'd laid awake while it happened, shivering with his frozen hand stuck fast to his mouth, too cowardly to shout out anything in protest and in the morning the bunk was still empty. There was only the smell of fear, but no ghost came back for him to apologize to._

 _They put another new boy in the bed a week later, an asthmatic little runt who would have been picked on by the hierarchy of the survivors, if tall, wide-eyed William hadn't immediately clung to him in a kind of living confessional._

 _The new boy heard it all and took it in alright, whooping for air and gasping and hugging him anyway. They were best friends. They knew everything, and by the time summer reached its next crescendo, they would have died for each other._

 _So William sweated and ate his mind half to death and confessed his sins to the new boy as the year went on, and nervously, feeling all the acid in his stomach roil and turn bitterly against him, he called as many kids together as he could dare into the barely used playroom shortly before midnight. It was still the 'good' season, so the guards let them mostly do what they like. They knew better than to misbehave anyway. So he stood and with his shaking, wavering voice said, "I think we can defend ourselves."_

 _"_ _They tried like over a decade ago, man." One of the bigger kids shoved black knuckles into the pockets of his cotton pants. "They gave it their best shot. What you think you got?"_

 _"_ _They didn't want to take the risk, no way could they consider going all the way with what the books told them. Because it's gotta be strong enough to match the Tepper Curse. And that's dangerous stuff. That's the darkest of magic, even if you're doing it for good. The books say that, over and over. That you gotta commit, and know the risks."_

 _A stillness came over the playroom as kids shifted and looked at each other. On some level, instinctual, they began to see what he was getting at._

 _"_ _We have to make our own defender. We gotta lift someone up, make 'em powerful enough to hit back." William inhaled, still shuddery. "But that costs. I mean, they're going to be bound here. Bound by death and life and the need to try and do their best to look out for us. Maybe even hunt down the evil thing and choke it out, right? So they gotta be stronger than they ever could be alive."_

 _"_ _Oh my God, William." A hand shook as a mouth was covered. The boy who spoke sounded nauseous._

 _"_ _I've got it all. I've got the runes and the circle." William wrung his fingers together. "I put it all together, sketched it out so many times I could do it in my sleep. We can do it right in here."_

 _"_ _No way, dude. No way you're getting a volunteer." Voices muttered in agreement. Too much, they said. No way. Not them. Not at that price._

 _William put his hands out, trying to get them back. "I'm not asking for one! I'll do it! I'll show you everything, and you do it to me." Because he couldn't save the boy in the bunk above. Because he dreamed about it, over and over and over._

 _The littlest boy, the runt with the inhaler, his friend, piped up in his reedy voice. "But you know how to do it. What if we screw it up? We'll lose you, Willy. You'll just be gone if we screw up."_

 _"_ _You won't. You just gotta do EXACTLY what I tell you." He patted at his thin chest under the stripy cotton shirt. "And the-the hard part isn't that hard. We're small. I looked it all up, found out how I won't bleed everywhere and then you just put my body in one of the holes. It's gross and scary, but it'll be easy and I'll be okay after. Even if it something goes wrong, at least I'm out, right?"_

 _"_ _But we could screw it up and we'll lose you or maybe something worse could happen! You know it all," said his friend, desperate to get him to see. The little boy stepped forward, grabbing at him with tiny fingers. Between them was every hour they'd been friends, between them was that raw sincerity. William had no choice but to heed. "I volunteer."_

 _The room went deadly still. The raspy, reedy voice that never had enough air to carry it was suddenly strong._

 _"_ _Do me. You know how, and it's stronger if it's willing, right? And I'm sick, I'm sick ALL the time. I'm a load, Willy. I want to. I want out." He reached forward again and hugged the bigger boy. "I forgive you already. For all of it. I want to save us. No more dead kids."_

 _. . ._

 _They did it at midnight the week before the man in black came. They did it in the playroom, with the stolen candles and the bundle of sheets laid as carefully as they could in the middle of the pre-carved circle. William did the rest, and he kissed his friend on the forehead, and it was quick. They had to take the knife away from him after, the other boys. Or they were going to lose two._

 _The wind screamed from midnight to dawn. It howled, it snarled in the chimney and it slammed all the windows shut. Guards ran down the halls, slapping on lights with their big adult faces slack with fear. That's how the children knew it was done. The ghost was real at last._

 _But it didn't save them._

 _It didn't save a single one._

 _The man in black still came that year, and the next year, and the wind screamed its offense and tried to blow out their candles. They relit them and moved on. The shadows of the dead crawled across the sea of grass to lick at their heels and shame them for what they did, but no one noticed. Stephen Tepper never looked down at the thing he helped make. There was only the dark._

 _The little dead boy never found out what happened to William. William was gone, either dead or into the world. The dead boy was alone, and no one could hear him whisper in his reedy voice. All they heard was his mindless screams on the wind._

 _. . ._

The little dead boy was hunkered on his rump, framed in the playroom door. It was the first time Loki had seen him full, the broken waxy face and the stains of blood along the thin, too thin chest still heaving shallowly within the sleeping shirt he'd died in. _"_ _I couldn't save anyone."_

Loki sat down by the edge of the circle, examining the trapped spirit plainly and with no small amount of real sympathy. "Tepper today has no magic, and no eye to see what is unseen. Not him, not his predecessors, not a single one amongst his shoddy little pretender's club, I think. Under his monument, there is only bone and scraps of long dead meat. I've looked with my better eye and there's nothing there to see. There was also nothing for you to stop, nothing within your chained realm to touch, save to give what fear you could. Your friends had the force of need and belief to empower you. The Teppers had only avarice, and that's not enough to make a ritual real. What the children needed was for the living to step up and save you, and the living never did. That was the failure, a tale repeated enough across more than one world to know its own truth. The living oft forget to be kind."

The air filled with the thin, rolling sob. _"_ _Is that true?"_

"It's true, little boy. It's true because I know these things far, far better than he or your intrepid friend William ever could. I do not boast. This is my domain, and I maintain it jealously. You did your best, and here, trapped in this place, you've been their eternal memory. That's not _nothing,_ boy. That's a story, and you just gave it to me. Freely, though I admit some cajoling on my part. And you're owed one more in turn. But first, I need to start a little work."

 _"_ _What are you going to do?"_

"Your William had it mostly right, but there's things to fix and change. And at the end of the changes, it'll set you free. The fire you set off here was a good attempt, but you can't burn out your own tether. Now, then. Pending one more scrap of duty on your part. One more thing to set it all right." Loki pulled a small packet of white silk from his pocket, his fingers feeling the edge of the knife inside. "Not because I'm kind, you must note. But because it is proper."

 _. . ._

The Little Prince: A Fine Knife to Cut Away the Dark

 _Sweet, still fat-faced young Thor flung his arm around his tinier brother as he plopped down beside, the other prince looking dirtily up at him from a book of old and likely useless magic their mother granted him just the night before. Still and all he was obsessed with it, the old made new again. Thor's voice was pitched comically low, a hiss for his brother's ears only, but loud enough to guarantee to any listener they were up to no good. "Are we sneaking into the forest tonight? We can't do it much longer, not until the seasons spin 'round again and the moons shift anew."_

 _"_ _You think our enemies need another routing?" Loki shut the book in his hands with a grudging sigh. Only a little grudging, for the forest had its own prizes at night to be stolen._

 _"_ _I do, little brother. Verily, I do very much indeed." Thor grinned, broad and white-toothed. "I would have one more word with my enemies this gloomy eve, before they are permitted their wild hunt untouched along our bleak skies."_

 _Loki rolled his eyes at Thor's florid and absolutely atrocious grammar. Gods help us all, the day the golden prince might choose to write his own speeches to a kingdom knelt before his elder knee. Already young Loki believed he had more taste than the coarser boy prince, and that he would do what he could to fix those someday speeches before they were set upon the ears of an unwary populace. But he loved the brutish and good-natured Thor all the same._

 _This was the game: Two princes at the edge of a forest rich and green and pleasant at day, black and haunting in the shadows of the strange long night where no moons hung in the controlled sky. A vast forest they weren't allowed in at the best of hours, and so the taboo made it the perfect place to play when they were too energized by their own youthful minds to sleep. They'd slip the guards, and Thor with his first weapons and Loki with his first spellbooks would go to the trees and come up with all the ways they'd protect great golden Asgard when the chains of Hel snapped free and set loose the unknowable upon everything they loved._

 _There were always more battles to fight, although they took care to not go too far into the woods. Whatever else might lurk there, Mother's ire was a greater fire to be wary of. On this, they were united. Only the fringe, and nothing more, with an eye to castle spires to ensure their own safety._

 _Loki considered it all, then smiled, already fangy and visibly wily along his pale features at this young age. "Then I've got some new spells in mind. Good ones. They'll frighten off anything that gets too close, and if that's not enough, I've got a summons I could try."_

 _Thor laughed down at him. "You pretend to be a little too fearless in the dark, brother. You've got to learn a taste of caution and not try to prove so much. It's not even like you go in there properly armed. I'm the one with a sword, you know." Oh, Thor was so proud of his first steel sword, granted him on his just passed twelfth nameday. Another would not be his until he proved worthy of it, so it did not matter that his treasure was soft-edged and prettier than it was useful. He loved it utterly._

 _"_ _Swords don't do enough against the legions of the dead and damned," said Loki haughtily, nettled that Thor called out his childish fears. He did not fear death, he thought, but he did fear the deepest dark of the woods, where the wind screamed coldly. Sometimes he had nightmares about that cold; sweaty, horrible things that jerked him upright with a scream strangling in his youthful throat. "You need magic for that, fire and ice both. You need me alongside, and if anything, I'M to be the stronger when all Hel breaks loose."_

 _Thor poked gently at the book in his brother's hands, knowing too hard a prod would get him a smack from a protective hand. "Spells from these books, then? The dust alone will choke our enemies where they stand." He got a smack anyway, for his droll tone and the mocking it carried. "You should bring your toy, too, to protect yourself further. The baby knife."_

 _"_ _It's an athame, you dolt." Loki bopped Thor on the head with the heavy tome, an act born out of sheer frustration. A gentle enough bop, but some real heat was behind it. "It's special. It's not a ruddy_ toy. _"_

 _"_ _It looks like a toy," said Thor, his brows knit together in doubt._

 _"_ _Well, it's my first. Like your sword. And just like your sword, that means I will treat it properly. It's only used for ritual work and purification, and it's supposed to be kept clean, both physically and spiritually. That does not mean I drag it around the ruddy woods at night to pick twigs out of my ruddy boot!"_

 _Thor flung his hands up in surrender. His brother was afire, better to let the matter ease. "My blade, then, and your books. And may all the darkling critters flee as we approach!"_

 _Loki nodded once, quickly mollified by the prospect of secret war against unceasing evil. As a truce, he offered a hug slung tight around his brother's waist. "Tonight. When the guards change shift."_

 _. . ._

 _The spell was still difficult for his hands to shape, and Loki was trying to be cautious and small about it. That made it trickier yet. The tiniest magelight to show their way down the overgrown path into the trees, a flickering pinpoint gleam of blue-white light that he let drop by their feet as they walked, to show up any roots that might trip their still-thin ankles. It followed along, dancing and bouncing along the crumbly earth and atop fallen needles and leaves. "Only that and no more, lest we warn the enemy of our approach."_

 _"_ _Or get caught by Mother. Or even worse, Father." Thor shuddered under his woodland grey cloak, tugged close for warmth. The act rattled the soft steel sword in its wooden scabbard, and he put his hand on it to still the noise._

 _"_ _Fair point," Loki whispered back. "Mother will be fury alight but that storm settles in time. Father will_ kill _us." He looked down to keep his mind and his guidance on the light, letting Thor take the lead into the deeper woods. "So what shall we hunt? Are Hela's minions led by the allied frostwolf charge tonight? Or does Surtr himself prepare the burning deep in the heart of the forest, setting the dark elves out to scuttle in the shadows to feed on us?"_

 _"_ _The frostwolves keep to the thinner woodlands to the east and especially amongst the small caves. Safer there, for them and us."_

 _"_ _Well, yes. That's where they were last year." Loki rolled his eyes. He'd established that, done the scouting himself among the shallower dips into Asgard's flat earth only to find scuffled dirt that absolutely, in the heat of his youthful imagination, could have been made by broad and hairy wolfen feet. Frost giants and their half-tamed beasts. He shivered, and not at all in pretend. "Migration is a thing, you know."_

 _"_ _Hela is cleverer than that. She might stick to the shadows, and trick us with the things we believe in." Thor turned and looked soberly at his brother, an expression oddly adult on the round face. "She might try to put us against each other. I'll see a shade and think it's you, and never realize it's a piece of her come to hurt me."_

 _Loki laughed in disbelief so raw it almost hurt. "That'll not happen, you know I'd never! Let her try, it'll be her final downfall!"_

 _Thor hugged him, full of trust. The scabbard on his back rattled again, and he pulled away to silence it once more. "Hush. Do you hear that?"_

 _Loki did not, and knew his ears were better, but he stilled anyway to see if Thor knew what he sensed._

 _Thor plunged ahead into the forest, almost at the edge of what the little light could do for them. That caught the air in Loki's throat and he sped up, not wanting to be left alone in the dark in his brother's wake. "What is it? What, what?"_

 _Thor pulled him into the lee of a tall, shadowing tree, peeking around its broad trunk. "Feral bilgesnipes, in service of an evil witch. I hear them slaver."_

 _Loki tried to not groan aloud. Them, again. Only them. More concerning was that for Thor, half the time it came down to evil witches and bitter trickeries. Too simplistic a war fantasy for his taste, and besides, Loki had some sympathies there already. He settled for rolling his eyes instead, then paused as something in the distance caught his eye. He craned his head around instead for a better look, his eyes blinking rapidly as wondered what it was he thought he saw._

 _The soft green light in the depths of the woods flickered back as if acknowledging his gaze. Unaware he was doing it, his small fine hand tightened on Thor's arm. "Scared of bilgesnipes tonight?" laughed his brother. Then he craned his head back around, still listening._

 _A shimmer of unwanted comprehension crawled along the flesh of his arms, raising all the fine little hairs._ He doesn't see it, _Loki thought._ It's real, and he doesn't see. _He took a hesitant step forward away from the tree trunk, forward towards the sickly green light. His eyes narrowed, trying to find a shape in the distant gleam as curiosity battled with the growing fright in his belly. He didn't hear Thor hiss at him, wondering what he was doing. He was going to give their position away to the enemy. He took another step, now utterly focused on the thing. He swallowed his fear down, he thought, thinking so fast it blocked everything else out. There was almost a sound, a frequency, something lower than his ears could catch. A thrum, a drumbeat that tried to match his heart and gripped at the deep part of the brain where fear lived._

 _Thor's stronger arm grabbing him around the waist and hauling him back made him screech in startled outright terror. "What's got into you? Now they're gone! All because you got scared of something!" Thor shook him, not because he was genuinely angry, but because Loki's face was dead white and he didn't know why._

 _"_ _I'm not scared!" Loki snapped it back, looking wildly again for the green light. It was gone, as was the crawling sensation within his inner ear. "I'm not at all ruddy scared!"_

 _Thor studied him, seeing the lie plain in the wide, staring eyes. "We're going back. No hunting tonight."_

 _"_ _No! The season's over, we won't come out here again!"_

 _"_ _There's next year." The older boy was relentless. "Come on, you can have the night with your new book instead." He grinned, hitting on at least one possible lure. "You'll be even better prepared then. New spells now? Why, you'll be all but a full sorcerer in a year!"_

 _"_ _Thor!" Loki's protest got him nowhere. Thor looked back at the gleaming castle to mark their way, then stomped on the tiny magelight to extinguish it and forestall all other argument. He had to follow along, else Thor would simply drag him._

 _Every few steps he looked back to see if he could find that distant light. He couldn't, and with each step he convinced himself harder that he hadn't been afraid at all._

 _. . ._

 _But the nightmare that wrapped itself around him in the dark hour before dawn reminded him he was terrified. Loki awoke with his hands flying up to his sweaty face, his still short mop of hair hair stringy and damp and stuck fast to his brow._

 _It was green in there, in the hollow of his mind._

 _All of it was green. That was the only thing he remembered – warped, wrapping colors all around his paralyzed form. Except the terror, and how he hated that sensation. He didn't want to be afraid. He could be stronger than that. He would make himself so._

 _. . ._

 _The next night Loki crept alone into the woods. Thor was well and truly asleep, coaxed into eating heavy at late evening sup and Loki's own room set with simple tricks and lights to make it seem as if the younger brother was still obsessed with his tomes should someone come and see. A scouting trip, only. He would be cautious this time. He would stay low and silent, and he would get a better look at what_ it _was, and then he would calmly go forth and study what to do about it. Because that is what a sorcerer should do, to serve his own curiosity and to use that in wisdom to save others. He believed in this utterly, knowing this was precisely how the future should go._

 _And as if to mock him, the distant green gleam did not appear. In pique, he went deeper into the woods than he ought, wrapped by the congealing blackness of the trees, and still he found nothing. Only the scent of fallen needles and rich royal loam. He shook his head and resolved to try again. He would spend the next day studying regardless, looking for something it could be. Anything. And failing that, there were seals and protections good against nigh any threat. When he went again, he'd bring the little knife._

 _Loki would not be afraid. He would be ready. He would protect Asgard from all threats, real or imagined. But he had to do it alone, because Thor could not see. He would protect Thor, too, because he loved them all._

 _That he did not sleep didn't trouble him. He didn't want the nightmare back anyway._

 _. . ._

 _The feel of cold steel in his hand made young Loki feel braver. At every opportunity in the day he'd tended to its short but sharp length, touching it gently with the mystic cleansing oils just as Mother had taught. Its hilt was almost pure silver, traced with a few speckles of opalescent material, and it had a bloodgroove along his length marked with runes whose name and purpose he could recite in his sleep. It was a simple athame, but a good one. He thumbed at its crosshilt as he carefully skulked deeper into the woods, and deeper yet._

 _It was well past midnight and weariness clung heavy to his thin shoulders. If he wasn't careful, he'd end up asleep among the trees. That would leave him vulnerable, so he bit the insides of his lip and he dug his fingernails into his palms, and he made sure he kept alert as he hunted._

 _It took another hour yet and a little more, but there it was. The distant, deep gleam of green. It was closer now, though Loki still could not see a shape within it. The thrum followed close behind, rumbling its warning through his growing bones and he told himself he was not afraid of it._

 _His palm was sweaty now around the hilt of his knife, so he gripped it harder and brought it up close to his chest to protect himself as he continued to creep forward despite every screaming alarm in his mind. What was it? Dear gods, what was the ruddy light?_

the light is us, we are the light, we are the breach between the living and the damned.

 _The thrum became the answer he rattled and his eyes flew wider yet at the thing that answered the question in his mind._

oh sweet and ripe little magician, we are hungry in the fields of Hel. Feed us.

 _The warning scream in his mind became a real thing spilling from his lips, understanding instinctively what it was. A haunt, a will-o-the-wisp, a trap laid by things not only dead, but worse than dead. He stabbed forward once with the athame, hoping to cut free some time to run, only to find a thicker section of the night's wood reached to slap it out of his hand._

 _"_ _No!" he managed to gasp out, his terror reaching a crescendo. He could manage nothing else._

 _The hands plunged out of the dark and wrapped around his throat, thick and gnarled with burnt bone. The stench choked him before the strong fingers did, the rippling, rotting flesh of the Hel-thing filling all his senses so grandly in their horror that it momentarily blinded him. Then he felt those implacable hands knotting close around his windpipe as he was lifted by his throat alone. In struck, grotesque awe he realized the charred fingertips of the dead creature were struggling to crush the vertebrae below his skull._

 _Loki whooped and gasped for breath, each struggle only losing him the few scraps of life that were still his as his hands flew up to his face to try and pry himself free. In desperation as stars began to spark before his eyes he slapped at the thing instead and found no purchase. His tongue felt thick in his mouth and all he could do was scream and scream in his mind again, praying for any rescue, any at all._

 _Its breath came in closer to him, its fetid mouth whistling and sucking away at the final breaths of air he could release. It fed on him, fed on the escaping life and his eyes wanted to weep and bleed. He couldn't look away. There were only the stars of his impending unconsciousness, and the black outline of the thing taking him away._

 _And then he saw it plain, lit by a roaring white light, trying to gasp again as what seemed a new sun showed him its torn cheeks, the hollowed places where eyes had collapsed into the cavity, where moss and rot spilled in place of hair. He struggled again as the word of power came from behind, and he_ felt _the slash of a knife as it cut through not air but ether and dimension._

 _"_ _Thou art bade gone," came another cry. "Release what you took and run to your damned mother's skirts! Run back to Hela and cower!"_

 _Loki was dropped to the ground as the thing howled in offense, his bruised throat still not letting him breathe even as he rubbed at it in a now-silenced plea. Everywhere was the light and he crawled towards it with a sob trying to scratch its way out of his chest. Behind him the thing fell back against the raw magical assault. It screamed and yowled, but it at last began to fade._

 _He saw the knife first, in that soft and elegant hand. Not his knife, but hers, Frigga's ancient athame, lit brilliant by magefire and her own indomitable will. Then it was gone, put away and he found himself scooped up into her embrace, he still small enough for her to do so. Now he could sob, though it hurt. Well behind her were the honor guards, tall and powerful in their armor of gold. Here in this hour, however, she was the stronger. "Mother, oh gods Mother, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." That hurt, too. Each word its own little blade behind his teeth._

 _Her long arms tightened around him as she turned away from the dark. "Fortunate you were I thought to check your room with my own eyes, little Loki, only to find your tricks at play." She didn't sound furious, only badly frightened, and he buried his face against her throat with another choking sob. "Do you know what you did?"_

 _He shook his head, feeling the bones in his neck scrape against each other._

 _"_ _There are places where the veil between realms is thin, and there are many of them in the deep woods. Some of them rub close between what is real and what is not. You were born sensitive to this, Loki. My little mageling boy. Things like that will feed on thee. You_ must _learn better caution and care."_

 _Loki nodded against her, his fingers knotting tight at the silks across her shoulder. He would, he silently promised to himself and her both. He would do_ everything _to not make this mistake again. Over her shoulder he could see the space between the trees where the thing had crawled through. The rifts and the glimpse of things beyond Death._

 _Curiosity took over as the fear drained, his body exhausted to its fringe but his mind still alive. The worst had come and he had survived._

 _The stories were real, he knew now. All of them._

 _He would study them, as long as it took. Everything that might try to make him prey, he would make them his own instead. And then he would never have to be afraid of the dark again._

 _. . ._

The athame glinted in Loki's hand as he finished carving new runes along the circle that had trapped a boy's soul into the breach between worlds, the white silk spread across his knee while he worked. Not the first knife of his childhood; that had been lost in the deep woods and he'd never gone back for it. This was _her_ knife, bound and empowered now to his hand alone by blood and magic. Frigga had not given it to him while she was alive; he'd taken it instead from the old jeweled case in her quarters late one night on a cautious visit to Asgard. The king had known he'd done so, and said nothing to stop him. The blade was always meant to be his in time. It had been a promise between them, long ago.

If the athame's magic lived, then in a way, so did a piece of her.

Loki did not focus on this as he worked. He'd given his story as promised, noting once the drawn, thoughtful expression of the dead boy in the silence that followed. He did not intend to give his secrets with it.

 _"_ _There's bits of your story that's like your friends."_

"And yours as well," he said, still distracted. "The shared experiences of youth, perhaps. An echo that ties story together. We are all lost in the forest, and we are all trapped high in castles made by our imaginative minds." He finished the last engraved line and looked up at the boy, his expression trained and neutral. "I'm done. When I activate it, you'll be given a chance to do what you need. And then, lad, you go home after all. I'll take care of the rest."

 _"_ _I don't have a home."_ Thin knees pulled up to the eternally bleeding chest.

"Yes, you do. There's a door you were kept from, when your friends set you on the other side of the threshold in the manner they chose. It will be frightening at first, but the keeper of that final door is quite nicer than you might expect. Nicer than me by far."

 _"_ _You're helping me, though."_ Black tears welled at the corners of black eyes. _"_ _Aren't you being nice?"_

"Because this is a sorcerer's duty, something I haven't done enough of in a long time. I set myself to other things instead, in selfishness." Loki ran his fingers alone the edge of the athame without looking up at the boy again, ensuring the etheric integrity of the blade was intact. He started wrapping it carefully in the white silk again. Its part of the ritual was done. The rest was simpler. Base. His fingernail would be enough to complete it.

 _"_ _How do I find the door when I'm done?"_

At that, Loki allowed a small but real smile. "Follow the candlelights set along the windows nearby. They'll guide you out."

Soft wind rustled against the floor as the boy rose and then drew a step closer. _"_ _I'm ready. I want to go."_

Without a word, Loki clenched his fist over the childish circle, digging his nails hard into his palm until they cut. A squeeze followed, encouraging out a single drop of blood. He watched as it formed, then fell.

The ripple of energy flowed out, bringing the wind with it. He closed his eyes against the surge of power, sensing the breaking of chains.

When he opened his eyes again, the circle, its duty now complete, was gone.

. . .

It was, as Daisy noted, a nice house on a nice property, with a large electronic gate that only opened if Stephen Tepper damn well wanted it to. But that did not matter to dead things. The boy's bare feet slapped against the black asphalt, the sound echoing and real in the dark. The door could not stop him either, though a wilted fragment of stolen mistletoe and sage was tied above the frame.

Tepper did not truly believe, not in his heart, and so his tools did not have power. He went through the motions. He did not pay a piece of his soul; how could he? He'd sold it off for mortal cash instead.

The boy walked through the oiled mahogany, still moving, still driven by decades of need and instinct, given purpose by a silver knife in a sorcerer's steady hand. Tepper was upstairs, huddled tight and only half asleep in his bed. Tepper slept as children might, restless and haunted by black dreams of screaming faces. In the day he felt no guilt. In the night, he was reminded of what he'd chosen to be.

The boy was the last reminder. He stood at the end of the brass bed frame and looked at the sleeping old man with his black eyes bleeding their black tears. He took a few more steps up to Tepper's side, reaching out a cold hand to caress the wrinkled, bristly face. This was the living curse, the final clasp of the chain that had imprisoned and terrified so many. He stroked again, then leaned forward to plant a clammy kiss on the taut forehead. Not in forgiveness. In promise.

Tepper's rheumy eyes flew open, dilating wide as he saw full the dead boy inches from his face. His mouth froze open, air catching and rattling in his chest as he saw and, for once in his life, believed in all the things his ancestors had sold him. Never before, save a whisper of wind along black candles. But now payment was due.

The dead boy reached out and grasped both sides of his face. Tepper tried to scream, but the boy ate it all instead, his face stretching and contorting as the wind spilled out of him to wreak chaos along the man's form, cracking against all the rich adornments displayed in this private room. The wind rose, and rose, and there were no screams. The dead boy permitted none. He took all the air back inside himself for his own, puffing his cheeks at the end like a hungry squirrel.

And then, for the first time in years, the dead boy laughed. Bell-like and rich and pure in the cold air that filled the bedroom. He let the man's face go, Tepper's soul hollowed out and his air stolen for his sins, and the dead boy turned to see the lane of lights that would take him home. Just as the sorcerer said.

 _They_ were waiting for him there. All of them. The bell-like laughs returned and they were not only made in his sweet voice, filling the night air with their joy and their hard-fought freedom.

The dead boy walked through the door, and he did not walk that last candlelit step alone. William took his hand and they went over the threshold together, into mystery.

. . .

Loki squinted up at the first hint of that cool orange light on the distant horizon, his hands stuffed in his jacket's pockets and his shoulders at ease. Before him lay the now-silent academy, emptied of its haunt and history both. There was one more thing to do, but it was a simple matter. The chain of events was already well in place long before he arrived. All he had to do was give it a little nudge.

He took one hand from a pocket and lifted a finger to his lips, almost in a kiss. Then he let the wisp of fire at its tip drop and crawl its way back into the building, where it would worm its way below into the tunnels. The chemicals, of course. Janitor's bleach and old methane, and forgotten tools and jugs and tubs in the shifting warrens below. The speck of fire contained itself until it found the right place to change it all, and then it spread into a consuming inferno, finishing what the dead boy had unwittingly nearly started.

First a vacuum, then a low explosion pulsed underneath the red brick building. Loki waited just long enough to be sure, glancing down when a crack suddenly formed in the concrete by his feet. He smiled and looked up to see the face of the academy begin to crumple in on itself. Good enough for him. He turned with a shrug and let himself out the gate while nature did the rest of the job.

A decade or so it would take, for a sinkhole to claim the unwanted stretch of land. Or this morning worked just as well, he'd decided, and have the story done and its victims buried proper.

Loki ambled down the brick path back to the sidewalks of the old neighborhood, grinning for himself as heads popped into windows all along the street to see what was going on at the cursed lot at the end of the lane. He lifted his head to enjoy the crisp air of the autumn morning, listening to the rising jabber as people began to call to each other with questions, never stopping, only moving.

Then he was gone, too, off to other mysteries of his own.

 _~fin_

 _10/31/2015 MDS. All relevant rights remain in the hands of Marvel with no infringement intended. All realities are fair game. All half-mad demigods do whatever the hell they want, especially this time of year. Hope you had a great Halloween!_


End file.
